An American girl’s island-hopping, tallow-tasting, party-crawling, tongue-twisting and sheep-stalking attempts to understand what it means to be Faroese.

About the Author

Miranda Metheny started this blog as part of her professional project as a master’s candidate of the Missouri School of Journalism. She spent a summer in the Faroe Islands, learning the language and falling deeply in love with the places and people of the archipelago.

Miranda currently resides in Missouri, in the United States of America. She is finishing up her master’s program and trying to decide on her next step in life. Her hobbies include traveling, writing, languages, culture, photography, and hiking. She speaks English, Spanish, German, Norwegian and Faroese.

Email: MirandaMetheny@gmail.com

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4 thoughts on “About the Author”

Hi, I am delighted to have come across your blog, as I am procrastinating during my study to midterm exams. I also have an enormous interest in Faroese culture, and I have never met anyone who has a similar level of interest in small island nations like I do. I was in the Faroes in June 2014 for a week. As a well travelled person, I can firmly say Føroyar is by far the most mesmerising place I have been on earth. It’s interesting to see another fellow non-Faroese visitor’s take on things in the Faroe Islands. I have read your articles and I love them. It gives me a warm feeling because I know many of the things you talk about and can easily recognise the places in the pictures.
Just a brief introduction of myself, I am a law school student in New Hampshire. I come from a rural town in China and have lived in Scotland and Canada. I am also a culture lover, and I am especially obsessed with Tuscany, Scotland, Ireland, Isle of Man, and Faroe Islands. I speak Hunanese, Cantonese, Mandarin, Italian, English, Scots, Irish, Spanish, and looking for ways to learn Manx and Faroese, but it seems like it’s very difficult to learn small scale languages outside of the specific nations. I’d very much like to exchange experiences with you. If you don’t mind, my email is brucehezicheng@msn.com.

Hello, thank you for the comment! It’s so cool to hear about your interests as well. Do you really speak Irish Gaelic? How unusual! It’s actually not too hard to learn Faroese. It’s not like Spanish where you can walk into any bookstore and find six dozen coursebooks, but there are now enough resources online to basically get you through. I’m planning to make a blog post about it sometime, in fact. I have contacted you! 🙂 Hope to chat soon.

I am quite skeptical about online teaching resources as I often find it misleading about the true local language, eg. What I learn online is not the way how locals really say and it is hard to be spot on pronunciation. I have realised that because I started learning Italian online when I was 13 then I went to Italy to study and found out many misleading information I had. I developed my interest in Irish when I was a wee bairnie learning English in Scotland because I was more drawn to the poetic ancient tongues of Gaels (Irish, Scots, and Manx) and since both Scottish Gaelic and Manx came from Old Irish so I decided to learn Irish. I took a two year course to study Gaeilge, learning the language from native speakers. My teachers came from Galway, Waterford, Donegal. When I visited Connemara two years ago my teacher said I was at intermediate level. Watch the short film Yu ming is ainm dom, about a Chinese boy spending 6 months to perfect Irish then finds no one understands him when he arrives in Ireland. That’s my story haha. But I have to say Irish is the most difficult language I have come across, and the limited range of usage doesn’t help the learners. I am very concerned about beautiful ancient endangered languages both culturally and politically because my mother tongue is a minority language in China without official status. That’s probably why I am so fascinated with the Celtic languages and also Basque language (a language in decline, I desperately wish to see the Basque Country independent). I’d very much like to see more of your blog about learning a small language and helping preserve a unique culture.

The substantial Faroese resources are really good, though few and far between. There is a textbook that came out in 2009. It’s pricy, but a really excellent product. The sound files are available for free online. There is a really good online Faroese-Faroese, English-Faroese-English dictionary (costs a monthly subscription fee, though). I’ve also been working with a few Faroese friends to make a Memrise course with a huge amount of Faroese vocabulary. Faroese pronunciation-orthography is irregular and a major barrier to learning the language from books or online, so I’m hoping the course will help with that problem. I lived for 4 months in Basque Country and learned some Basque as well, but I was nowhere near fluent and have forgotten a lot since. I would love to post more about the issues you describe. Thanks for some motivation. 🙂 We really have a lot in common, so I hope to connect with you soon.